"It is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace"

Archive for August, 2012

We have taken a kind of synoptic view of the biblical doctrine of redemption. We have looked at it in general. We have surveyed the whole landscape, as it were. We have looked at it from beginning to end, and have seen that God in His kindness and love and mercy and compassion, and in His infinite grace, looked upon men and women when they deserved nothing but hell and destruction, and gave them the promise of their wonderful redemption that would finally be consummated in His own eternal Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Therefore to Him, and to Him alone, must of necessity be all the praise and all the honour and all the glory!

“Suppose we go down after the service to the evening snacks prepared by our ladies. On one of the tables you see a bowl of fruit that looks inviting. Yet you realize that someone brought to church a bowl of artificial fruit by mistake instead of real apples, bananas, and oranges. Not wanting to offend her, you make your selection, sit down, then start chewing on a plastic banana.

That sounds ludicrous, of course. Yet spiritually speaking that is exactly what is going on in the American church. Multitudes of church-going people profess Christ but the fruit of their lives testify to the artificiality of their profession. Not wanting to offend them, we just chew on and try to swallow down the false fruit they are offering. By the looks of things in our churches, it appears a good act is more acceptable than the good fruits that God requires.”

Scott shares some reasons why we should keep reading the book of Leviticus today:

1. It’s the Enemy’s Favorite Book to Tear Apart (Think Shellfish, Polyester, Tattoos, and Homosexuality)
2. The Theological Holiness Code Developed in Leviticus is Still Used Today
3. To Understand How the Work of Christ Saves the Soul
4. Because Without Leviticus the Other 66 Books Don’t Make Any Sense

“Every book is intertwined with every other book. This is a huge reason to me. If you are reading Kings or Nehemiah, or one of those other “important” books, you are reading part 11 or part 16, but you never read part 3. Knowing and understanding Leviticus is crucial to understanding any of the other books, just the same as reading and studying Kings is important to reading Matthew.

What sense does Christ being crucified on the cross make without knowing how the sacrificial system works? I understand you can watch the Lord of the Rings or the Star Wars movies out of order and you can still understand them individually, but don’t they make a whole lot more sense as a whole?”

He develops these points briefly here. So open your Bibles soon and read Leviticus.

Anders Breivik’s sentence for killing 77 people in Norway on July 22, 2011 is outrageous. He was deemed sane and sentenced to serve 21 years in prison “in a three-cell suite of rooms equipped with exercise equipment, a television and a laptop.” That’s 100 days of posh prison time for each person he murdered, with a legal release possible at age 53. Life is cheap in Norway.

The news agencies explained that such a sentence

is consistent with Norway’s general approach to criminal justice. Like the rest of Europe . . . Norway no longer has the death penalty and considers prison more a means for rehabilitation than retribution.

They explained that “many Europeans” consider America’s criminal justice system to be “cruelly punitive.” And the blog post I am now writing, naturally, would fall into the category of vindictive.

“We are facing a true moral inversion — a system of moral understandings turned upside down. Where homosexuality was even recently condemned by the society, now it is considered a sin to believe that homosexuality is wrong in any way. A new sexual morality has replaced the old, and those who hold to the old morality are considered morally deficient. The new moral authorities have one central demand for the church: get with the new program.

This puts the true church, committed to the authority of God’s Word, in a very difficult cultural position. Put simply, we cannot join the larger culture in normalizing homosexuality and restructuring society to match this new morality. Recognizing same-sex unions and legalizing same-sex marriage is central to this project.”